ons, and refused the others.

"We are big enough now," said Cyrus H. McCormick. "It is not safe for one
company to have a monopoly. What we want to do is to regulate competition,
not to destroy it."

Besides the big Osborne Company, which is now the third largest in the
combine, the Harvester Company has bought five smaller concerns, and built
two new plants--one in Canada and one in Sweden. It is like the original
United States--a union of thirteen industrial colonies. Its output has
risen to 700,000 harvesting machines a year, including all varieties; and
its annual revenue is more than seventy-three million dollars.

With its 25,000 employees and 42,000 agents, this one company is
supporting as many families as there are in Utah or Montana. A square
mile of land would be too small to contain its factories. At its hundred
warehouses there is trackage for 12,000 cars. Around its workshops are six
busy railways of its own, whose engines last year pulled out 65,000
freight-cars, jammed full of machinery for the farmers of the world.

Its properties are so widespread that no member of the company has seen
them all. To run around their circle would be a trip of 15,000 miles. It
owns 20,000 acres of coal lands in Kentucky, 100,000 acres of trees in
Arkansas, Mississippi, and Missouri, and 40,000,000 tons of ore in the
Wisconsin and Mesaba Ranges. It has staked its money--$120,000,000--upon
the belief that for fifty years longer, at least, the scientists will find
no substitute for bread.

The fact that Elbert H. Gary, the official head of the Steel Trust, is one
of its directors, has not prevented this self-sufficient company from
owning a complete steel plant, where 2,000 Hungarians make iron from ore,
and steel from iron. It saws its trees into lumber in Missouri, and roasts
its coal into coke in Kentucky. Its domains are so extensive, in fact,
that if they were contiguous, they would make a Harvester City as
spacious as Greater Chicago.

But the most surprising feature of this unique corporation, to one who
sees it for the first time, is the distracting variety of things that pour
out of its factories. Its business is by no means to make harvesters and
nothing else. Its true character seems to be that of a manufacturing
department store for farmers. As a matter of actual count, I found in its
factories and warehouses thirty-seven different species of machines,
besides all manner of variations of each sort.

Here y